Saturday, July 7, 2007

There seems to be two forces at play in the US - and other countries. There is a constant battle between the forces of change - science, progress, new thinking - and the forces that support keeping things the way they are - support for the "status quo." Consider the forces that tried to keep Europe in the Middle Ages - the Church, feudalism - that were threatened and ultimately surpassed by the forces of science and merchantilism, which has given us our current technology and the freedoms that they bring. Thanks to the Internet, I can express my philosophy - in opposition to organized religion - without being burned at the stack as a heretic.

It is my belief that America must defeat the inertia and backwardness of the forces of the status quo, and embrace the future. America became a great country because of our instinct for invention, technology, and innovation. We still see this in some of our information and military technologies, but otherwise much of America has become backward, anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-reason.

For example, the United States - because of the bloated economy we possess - is able to avoid such simple and common-sense changes as adopting the metric system for measurement. We continue to use and teach an irrational system based on archaic units. This hurts our integration with the world economy, increases chances for errors, and has no logical basis. Such irrational behavior must stop.